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Tuesday, 5 August 2014

22 OF THE MOST EPIC PRODUCT FAILURES IN HISTORY

22 Of The Most Epic Product Fails in HistoryBy Drake Baer and Jay Yarow, Business Insider, 31 July 2014.

Launching a product is hard to do.

"Less than 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed first-year sales of US$50 million - considered the benchmark of a highly successful launch," say Joan Schneider and Julie Hall, co-authors of "The New Launch Plan."

That's part of the reason that the most heavy-hitting names in business - from Pepsi to Netflix, Microsoft to McDonald's - have had some of the biggest belly flops.

Here's a look at 22 of them and what we can learn from these epic fails.

Bill Gates cites the Edsel flop as his favourite case study. Even the name "Edsel" is synonymous with "marketing failure." Ford invested US$400 million into the car, which it introduced in 1957. But Americans literally weren't buying it, because they wanted "smaller, more economic vehicles," according to Associated Content:

Other pundits have blamed its failure on Ford Motors execs never really defining the model's niche in the car market. The pricing and market aim of most Edsel models was somewhere between the highest-end Ford and the lowest-end Mercury.

Sony made a mistake: It started selling the Betamax in 1975, while its rivals started releasing VHS machines. Sony kept Betamax proprietary, meaning that the market for VHS products quickly outpaced the company.

Microsoft Bob was supposed to be a user-friendly interface for Windows, a project that was at one point managed by Bill Gates' now wife, Melinda. Microsoft killed it one year after launching it in 1995.

Why?

"Unfortunately, the software demanded more performance than typical computer hardware could deliver at the time, and there wasn't an adequately large market," Gates later wrote. "Bob died."

In 1996, McDonald's introduced the Arch Deluxe, which never caught on. It was intended to appeal to "urban sophisticates" - outside of its target demographic. To reach this group McDonald's spent US$100 million, which makes it one of the most expensive product flops in history.

File this under "too good to be true": In the late 1990s Frito-Lay rolled out a miracle food, a line of chips with the upbeat branding of WOW! The marketing claim was tantalizing - a compound called Olestra allowed for a fat-free potato chip.

But it was not to be.

"While it provided the satisfaction of tasting just like fat, (Olestra's) molecules were too large to be digested by the body, passing directly through the digestive tract unabsorbed," writes Fast Company. "Sadly, the result was similar to that of a laxative - stomach cramps and diarrhoea prevailed."

We just weren't brave enough, honestly, and we ended up chasing Apple with a product that actually wasn't a bad product, but it was still a chasing product, and there wasn't a reason for somebody to say, oh, I have to go out and get that thing.

The good news is you can still grab one on eBay, along with that bottle of Orbitz.

14. Mobile ESPN (2006)

Mobile ESPN, introduced in January 2006, was one of the biggest flame-outs of "mobile virtual network operators," or MVNOs, in the past decade, which also included Amp'd Mobile, Helio, Disney Mobile, and others.

The idea was that ESPN would exclusively sell a phone that offered exclusive ESPN content and video, leasing network access from Verizon Wireless. But ESPN had only one phone at launch, a Sanyo device selling for US$400.

No one bought it, and ESPN quickly shut down the service, instead providing content to Verizon's mobile Internet service.

15. HD DVD (2006)

Sponsored mostly by Toshiba, HD DVD was supposed to become the hi-def successor to the DVD when it launched in March 2006.

About a month later, Toshiba said it would shut down its HD DVD efforts.

16. Joost (2007)

Joost, originally known as "The Venice Project," was supposed to be a peer-to-peer TV network for the future, invented by the European geniuses behind Skype. The company recruited a rising star - Mike Volpi - away from Cisco to become its CEO. It got a deal with CBS.

Joost was supposed to reinvent the way we consumed professional video.

Instead, Hulu, a joint venture between News Corp., NBC, and Disney, became the go-to site for TV episodes on the web.

Meanwhile, Joost had all sorts of problems with its P2P architecture, its bulky software player, its content library, etc. After launching in September 2007, it never took off, with its scraps selling in late 2009.

When the economy went down the toilet, those dreams faded fast, and Google quickly pulled the plug by November 2008.

18. JooJoo (2009)

In the era of a US$499 Apple iPad, an inferior tablet computer that also costs US$499 doesn't work. (You may remember this device from its previous title, the CrunchPad.) It came out in 2009 and was gone by 2010.

And, in fairness to HP, the TouchPad wasn't that bad. It was rough around the edges, but those could have been smoothed in the coming months. It just didn't really do anything better than the iPad, which means it's just like every other tablet out there.

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